Category: JavaScript

I am currently using a BDD framework with Cucumber, Selenium and Java for automating a web application. I used page factory to store the objects and using them in java methods I wanted to replace the java piece of code with javaScript like mocha or webdriverio. could you share your thoughts on this? can I still use page factory to maintain objects and use them in js files

My response…

What’s the reasoning for moving to JavaScript from Java? Despite having common names, there’s very little otherwise in common (Car is to Carpet as Java is to JavaScript.)

I wouldn’t move for moving sake since I see no benefit in writing BDD style web tests in JavaScript, if anything, e2e automated tests are much harder to write in JavaScript/Node because everything is asynchronous and so you have to deal with promises etc. which is much harder to do than just using Java (or Ruby).

Aside: I still dream of writing e2e tests in Ruby: it’s just so pleasant. But our new user interface is written extensively in JavaScript (React) so it makes sense from a sustainability point of view to use JS over Ruby.

Once upon a time there lived a couple who loved playing massively multiplayer online role-playing video games with each other (World of Warcraft or Destiny or something). The thing about these games is that they’re a bit like exercise/fitness where you need to keep playing them to keep your score high, and if you don’t you play them (or exercise) enough your score (or fitness) starts dropping which makes it much less fun overall.

How should someone approach learning JavaScript strictly for the purpose of test automation? Should they learn it the way a front-end developer would or is there a better way to learn it for purposes of writing automation?

anil also asks…

I need to do automation by using mocha chai framework with selenum webdriver. can you please guide me or suggest any site or video on how to start and what are the basic things need to know.

Saw your recent post on JS vs Ruby. As a recent migrant from Ruby to JS for mobile test automation – couple of questions 1) how are you doing page objects (ES6 works too) 2) Are you able to run your E2E tests in parallel? 3)Is there anything like binding.pry for debugging JS whilst execution?)

My response…

This post explains how we’re doing our page objects in ES6, and since all our e2e tests are open source, you can see for yourself :)

We use CircleCI which supports parallel test execution, which I enabled in the past, but it’s currently disabled as it was consuming too many build containers which are shared across our organization. Since we have a lot more containers available now I have it on my list to renable these.

I believe WebStorm supports debugging Node Mocha tests; I’ve been meaning to investigate this over console.log statements; I’ll report back when I get around to it.